Hopewell Cemetery

The town of Navarro began in the early 1880s as Hopewell, named for the Baptist church, the Handbook of Texas says. When the railroad bypassed it in the early 1900s the town moved to a site on the line and took the name Navarro. A post office opened in 1908, and by 1914 the place had a cotton gin, three general stores, two blacksmiths and about fifty people. The population reached seventy-five by the mid-1930s. After World War II the stores closed, and by the mid-1960s only a school and scattered houses remained.

What the plaque says

Hopewell Cemetery Burials at this site on the 1846 Wilson Reed survey date from the 1860s. Hopewell Baptist Church, founded in 1866, erected a church building on adjoining property two years later. The earliest marked grave is that of an infant, John W. Pritchard, who died in 1870. Another gravestone bearing the date 1870 is that of William C. Fouty (1866-1870), is also interred here. In 1875 Joshua Parmer Cox (1824-1881) purchased from J. H. Manning property which included the cemetery site. Cox, whose grave is located here, donated the land beside the church for use as a public burial ground. When the railroad extended south from Corsicana, the town of Navarro (1 mi. N) was laid out and Hopewell Baptist Church moved there in 1907. Navarro became a thriving community, dependent on cattle and farming until the oil boom of the 1920s. The Hopewell Cemetery Association was organized in 1919. Before that time, families traditionally brought picnic lunches and gathered to tend the graveyard on annual workdays. In 1940 the cemetery was enlarged when two adjacent acres were purchased from Hugh and Irene Wilson. The 500 marked graves include those eof veterans of several wars. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Petroleum Industry Park — 9.6 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.
• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 14 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 27 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.

More markers nearby

• Hopewell Baptist Church — 1.8 mi
• Air Activities of Texas, Corsicana Field — 3.7 mi
• Home of Whitney Montgomery, Poet — 4.3 mi
• Angus Schoolhouse — 4.8 mi